Posts filed under 'Consumer Rant'
Improveverywhere (IE), the informal flash mobbing group that stages ‘missions’ in public places (mass standstill on Grand Central Station, synchro swimming in Washington Square Park fountain etc.), has posted a video of their most recent event: a spontaneous musical by ’staff’ in the food court of a Los Angeles mall. It struck a chord with me because at high-school my clique of friends dreamed of a similar outburst in the class room or on the hockey pitch (but of course we never carried it out in those deferential, British, pre-Hairspray days). If you look at IE’s blog most comments are full of admiration for the food court video; but one or two see this mission as a departure from IE’s core of informal, inclusive activities. Typically, IE’s missions are organised via internet (their web site, social networking) and mobile phone. Participants (‘agents’) turn up on the day ready to do what’s necessary, and it works, more or less. The food court mission required a song to be written, a day’s rehearsal, negotiations with the mall authorities, and a team of actors who could sing and dance. Instead of IE’s typical compilations of unsteady video clips after the event, a professional-looking edit was posted. And the end result was less about the experience of the individuals involved (although it must have been a blast) than about the reactions of bystanders in the mall, as this erupted in front of them. But it was fun to watch and share, and most bloggers wished they had been there to experience it, so why carp?
Coincidentally Newsweek published an article last week, The Revenge of the Experts, claiming that web users now seek expert knowledge rather than peer commentary on the web. The article used Google’s Knol expert knowledge pilot and Mahalo (a start up Google rival, where search results are vetted by experts) as examples of responses to this need. Read a little further in the Newsweek article, though, and you find a comment from Jason Calaconis, Mahalo’s founder, ‘The more trusted an environment, the more you can charge [advertisers] for it.’ Ah, so that might be what’s going on. Could it be that users are being sent an ever-so-subtle message about peer group unreliability in order to drive them to more profitable sites? And will they be getting what they’re looking for even when they choose those authoritative-looking sites? According to Mindhacks, a set of apparently authoritative articles on sleep disorders have been published by the National Sleep Foundation, an organisation that receives funding from drug companies, which it spends on ‘public education’ i.e. advertising the existence of sleep disorders. Not an isolated example, I am sure, but just an indicator of the potential for messages with a specific bias from an apparently authoritative source.
It’s a bit of a stretch from Improveverywhere to the National Sleep Foundation but it’s worth it to make the point that much can be lost when basic user-generation is compromised. Heartwarming as the food court video is, it raises the bar for other IE missions. Will its high production values put them off? Will highly orchestrated mobs like this reduce the inclusivity of future missions (as far as I can tell many people join IE and turn up for missions without knowing anyone else who involved, and that’s where their social networking begins)? It will be interesting to see. It could go either way: the video could spawn many more adventurous mobs, or it could clip the wings of the project as a whole.
More generally the web is messy and full of mis-information, and production values are often low. But, nevertheless, good information will out. As the commercial story behind the Newsweek article unfolds, Andrew Keen, author of ‘The Cult of the Amateur’ is quoted as saying ‘no one wants to advertise next to crap’. But what’s his definition of crap? Slightly rough content, sometimes contradictory, sometimes superficial but which is, nevertheless, up-to-date and may just include some nuggets you couldn’t find anywhere else? User-generated content has its pitfalls, and web users need to be educated about them (and about the pitfalls (and strengths) of expert information too). But to lose peer commentary, to authorise and sanitise it would be to lose much of what drives people to the web in the first place. Olly Buxton, writing one of several critical Amazon reviews of Keen’s book, picks up on the issue of what can be gained from user-generated content. Citing the Britannica/Wikipedia dispute he writes
‘if the choice were blind faith in Encyclopaedia Britannica or a sceptical read of Wikipedia, I know which I’d have, and which I’d counsel for my children - especially since Wikipedia is automatically up-to-date, preternaturally following the zeitgeist, and replete with good know-how on things that Britannica would never have in a million years’.
So I would say to advertisers think twice before investing in the authority and expertise the internet ‘controllers’ want to bring about; there may be more to trust (and to invest in) in peer commentary, ‘crap’ notwithstanding.
Newsweek link via Putting People First
March 12th, 2008
Lots of folks are unaware that multiple brands are owned by the same company (e.g., the same company owns Gap, Banana Republic, Old Navy). Consumer activists often complain that this practice is deceptive because it tricks consumers into believing that there are big distinctions between brands when, often, the differences are minimal. Personally, while I’d love to see more consumer brand awareness, but I think that brand distinctions play an important role. I just wish that the tech industry would figure this out.
I’m a relatively educated consumer and I’m also one of the most brand-loyal customers out there. When it comes to food and personal care products, many of my brand decisions come down to smell and taste, even when these are completely manufactured in a lab in New Jersey to differentiate soaps, toothpastes, and other products that are chemically identical. I buy All laundry detergent and not other Unilever brands (Surf, Wisk) or P&G brands (Tide, Gain, Cheer) simply because it smells better. When it comes to clothes, fit trumps everything.
In other words, my purchasing decisions are heavily affected by “interface.” (Politics and convenience too…) When a company changes the interface, I get cranky. I’m still cranky with my favorite pretzel brand for eliminating the air bubbles in their pretzels that allowed for more salt to build up. The reason that I’m committed to most consumer brands is not because I love the company. For many products, I’m not even influenced by the lifestyle being sold. I simply love the interface. Luckily, most retail companies get that their interface matters and when they futz with it, they create a separate brand or segment the primary brand into “Original” and “New with XYZ.” In the world of retail, a brand represents its interface. There are interfaces I like, those that I don’t, and those that I’m completely ambivalent about. But the interface often matters a whole lot more than the “features.”
Why do technology companies often fail to understand branding the way retail folks do? Many think that they can change the interface at whim to spice-up their product. They approach user retention as user lock-in, rather than user satisfaction and commitment. They try to shove everyone into the same interface in a one-size-fits-all paradigm that tends to fit few. Why??
Unfortunately, I don’t think that many companies are aware of the limitations of their brands. When they’re flying high, their brands are invincible and extending it to a wide array of products seems natural. Yet, over time, tech companies’ brands get entrenched. Certain users identify with it; others don’t. New products using that brand enter into the market with both cachet and baggage. Yet, tech companies tend to hold onto their brands for dear life and assume users will forget. Foolish.
We all know that youth talk about certain products as “sooo last year.” This tends to cover a genre rather than a brand. Yet, teens also have plenty to say about the brands themselves. Yahoo! and AOL, for example, are for old people. When I asked why they use Yahoo! Mail and AOL Instant Messaging if they’re for old people, they responded by telling me that their parents made those accounts for them. Furthermore, email is for communicating with old people and AIM is “so middle school” and both are losing ground to SNS and SMS. While Microsoft is viewed in equally lame light amongst youth I spoke with, it’s at least valued as a brand for doing work. Yet, even youth who use MSN messenger think that msn.com is for old people. Why shouldn’t they? When I logged in just now, the main visual was a woman with white hair sitting on a hospital bed with the caption “10 Vital Questions to Ask Your Doctor.”
Take a look at all of the major portals attempting to reach universal audiences. Now imagine yourself as a teen. Why would you even visit them? Even if you were the rare teen who cared about Autos, Careers & Jobs, Dating & Personals, Finance & Money, Health & Fitness, or Real Estate, one click in and you know that this content is not targeted at you. Even the sites that allow you to “personalize” your modules rarely let you get rid of these or make them relevant to you. To make matters worse, now that these companies are heading towards mobile, they are taking these one-size-fits-all interfaces and cluttering up the phones. Ugg! Why?
I would like to offer two bits of advice to all of the major tech companies out there: 1) Start sub-branding; and 2) Start doing real personalization.
If you’re creating a new product, launch it with a new brand. Put your flagship brand on the bottom of the page, letting people know that this is backed by you - this is not about deception. Advertise it alongside your flagship brand if you think that’ll gain you traction. But let the new product develop a life of its own and not get flattened by a universal brand. Some products should be niche, especially those targeted at youth; while youth are happy to use well-established tools, they also like to distinguish their practices from those of adults and mature into new brands. In other words, they aren’t going to fall to your lock-in for very long. If you’re buying a well-established brand, don’t flatten it, especially if it’s loved by youth. Kudos to Google wrt YouTube; boo to Yahoo! wrt Launch. Even at the coarse demographic level, people are different; don’t treat them as a universal bunch, even if your back-end serves up the same thing to different interfaces.
Personalization is more than skinning and moving modules around. Give me a blank slate and let me add modules that might be relevant to me. Alternatively, make some good initial guesses based on what you know about me and let me modify them from the getgo. Help me find the modules that are most likely to appeal to me - you already have a lot of data on what it is that I do; use it for something that helps me. This is particularly important if there are going to be a bazillion Apps or Gadgets or Widgets out there because I don’t want to comb through the crud. A targeted interface is just as important as a targeted ad.
Above all, understand that no brand is universally loved and one size does not fit all. Most of us look like idiots in XXL shirts and we don’t want our technology interfaces to be XXL. People like brands that fit them like a glove. The tech industry serves up ads this way; why doesn’t it get this when it comes to their own brand? Technology is well positioned to create sub-brands and personalize those brands from there. It’s high time for the tech industry to grow up and start doing so.
February 23rd, 2008
When operators came up with the idea of topup accounts - or pay-as-you-go, as they say in all the right places, we all jumped in total euphoria and exclaimed “Whoopie-Doo!”. What we really meant was: “Here is a cool way for me to run around with three mobile accounts, therefore piling up the free-texts, and living the life of almost zero mobile costs”. The downside was to mess about with three different mobile numbers, sim cards, chargers and so forth. Why, oh why is it always so hard to save a penny or two? Happy- hour at the pub, Orange-Wednesday at the cinema, two-for-one and all the rest of it.
Why do we feel that this top-up business is not for us anymore?
Quite simply, because this type of account pricing was invented in 1999, when we were thirteen, and nowadays, we are all in our early twenties, and some of us in our first job. What we want is better tariffs at affordable prices, not pricing schemes that make us feel all weird at the newstand, as if we had just moved into the UK from a far away country where the telephone lines are still analogue and we have to pay with coins at the telephone booths. Not now, that we feel pretty good about ourselves, we can finally kick about getting paid - though minimally - by our first employer, and the opposite sex talks to us in a bar because we are interesting, if not coolly chilled and with good vibes. Just when being young is what makes us all super-special…. Society should reward us better for that, isn’t it?
Blyk got that, and hence worked up a way to match the economic need of this generation with some real sense of self-respect. Just because I get minimal salary because I am young, does not mean I need to go through the “top up the SIM card” process at a kiosk.
I’m not trying to be cheap here. I’m not trying to dodge the system. I just want to feel that being a student or a first-time jobber does not kill my mojo when I hit the streets and I run out of credit on my phone and have to run into a shop to keep my life connected…
Are you with me?
February 19th, 2008
In her Shift6 post last week danah queried who actually clicks on internet advertising and concluded that, far from the targets advertisers hope for, it may be those who tend not to use the internet in a focused way, possibly the least technology literate. Advertisers might be heartened by positive reports of the impact of Land Rover’s advertising on iPhone. iPhone users are a pretty select group and could well be just the targets Land Rover want. Certainly they are likely to make informed choices about what they browse. But to understand the real impact of the campaign itself one would also have to factor in the novelty impact (still) of the iPhone and the fact that iPhone appears to deliver a better browsing experience than any of its competitors.
And it’s that experience that I want to come back to. Because, as I commented on danah’s post, it’s so hard for users to get a good experience of the technology as it is presented to them, out of the box. Often organisations prioritise the functionality they want to attract users to – this could be because it adds pzazz at the point of sale (video telephony), or because, when used, the functionality can generate revenue (internet portal). And many users (perhaps most) do not know how to customise their device, or fear the consequences of playing around with the interface, concerned that customising will bring about irreversible results they hadn’t anticipated. On a mobile phone interface marketing priorities can be particularly irritating. There’s so little real estate, the manufacturer’s or service provider’s priorities can squeeze the options people actually want to use. Since it appears that the most frequently used functions on mobile phones are voice, text and time/alarm clock, you might expect many people to have those functions, and everything connected to them, immediately visible on their home screen. Often, surprise, they are not.
However, as danah’s post implies you are most likely to have focused access to the functionality you want if you have grown up with computers and mobile phones; put simply if you are young. Don Norman thinks younger people understand technology better because they have the time to play around with it. Certainly that’s a factor. A review by Hilary Coolidge also highlights the social element of technology use among teenagers, that peers are likely to be influential, providing opportunities to learn new skills, in a way that may not be typical for older users (last Saturday evening at a restaurant where I was eating a group of late teens were having a celebration meal. Every one of them was using their phone to snap and share pictures of their friends. It just wouldn’t have been the same with a generation older, at least not in the UK). And along with the time and social milieu, I think younger users are less scared of the consequences of tweaking technology settings. Perhaps this is naïveté (having sorted out my pre-teenager’s phone from over-exuberant tweaking I can vouch for that), perhaps justified confidence, or a combination of the two.
The need to respond to the combination of naïveté and lack of confidence was reflected in Stephen Fry’s post in his Guardian blog this week. In typical avuncular tones he encourages readers to desert the standard Internet Explorer or Safari default on their PC or Mac, and to consider using Firefox, with a step-by-step guide to how to do it. Handholding of this kind is exactly what people need in order to get the most out of technology and the comments on Fry’s post suggest his readers (of all ages) are grateful for it. Now I’m not suggesting that Microsoft or Apple should tempt their customers to ignore their proprietary software for open source alternatives (well, I might dream). But I do wish technology companies would open up the potential for customisation to their users, so that people can clear away what they genuinely don’t want to use and tweak what they are using so it best fits their needs. And, remembering the (possibly apocryphal) comment “I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and I’m not going to read a book,” this possibility can’t be covered off via a paragraph embedded in a manual. It needs a more up-front approach: this piece of equipment (your phone, your laptop, your camera etc.) is yours to customise, just as you will move a piece of furniture to the place you want it after it has been delivered to your home. Sadly, we’re a long way off from that, so focused use and customisation remain the preserve of those who, firstly, know that customisation or alternatives to basic settings are a possibility; secondly, have sources of support to go ahead; and, thirdly, have the confidence to ‘just do it.’
December 13th, 2007
Moving from a closed circle of networked communications, that is, me and my friends towards one where brands come into play is transforming certain platforms, namely mobile phones and television. It is a fact. There are two big rules in programme scheduling: choose your audience and sell advertising space that they are receptive to. This is why during the Rugby World Cup final, AUDI showcased its latest powerhouse of an engine… wowing everyman in the pub. And our “Britain’s Next Top Model” is sponsored by a make-up brand. In the case of youth audiences, brands are beginning to segment more than ever. It looks like the battle of the sexes is up and you are either a fashion-crazed aspiring kitten or an mbox-addict/sports-mad dude. What is to happen to unisex brands, like music or design-driven brands, which is a harder kind to juggle?
I call these brands the “Life Soundtrack Brands”. They are not trying to sell me anything in particular, because the market is well aware of who they are and what they sell, but are reminding me of how great it is to live in this world with them around me/on me/ in my house. Perhaps their message to my phone is for me to come to one of their shops to checkout the new interior, their new stock of goodies - this is Apple’s super stores strategy, or download a mini video of their latest campaign, designed to interact with me on tv, the web and my mobile. Whatever it is that comes to my phone, I repeat, has to be under the following expectations:
(a) the brand is known to me and I like it;
(b) the brand is new to me but the ad is so cool, I actually like it;
(c) the brand is not known to me but their stuff rocks and I want to know more about them (and the ad is cool, too);
Most of the time, we get (d):
(d) the brand has no impact on my psyche, probably because they are using the same campaign on TV (and I’ve already watched their ads five hundred times whilst watching “Hollyoaks”) or the campaign is just lame… visually unengaging, boring creative, old advertising stereotypes…
It’s also about not bombarding the same ad a hundred times a week. A given ad is as good as its limited broadcast. Remember Budweiser’s “Wassup?” ads… they only got better when people began to do mash-ups online… eventually, the ones broadcasted on TV managed to annoy the whole nation… as half your friends began to greet you with such parody every time you’d show up at their place and rang the doorbell… I have little patience for this lemming behaviour, you may have noticed…
People like ads when they are good. They even watch them in youTube. Not every ad on TV falls under this category. Current washing up liquid ads are just domesticity at its worst. Or softdrinks. By the way, have you noticed there has never been a RedBull ad on TV? And you want to know why? Because they came to where their audiences were and built a presence there, sponsoring bmx events and creating a drink that would serve the demands of hardcore clubbers.
Brands have an excellent opportunity to make themselves loved and respected in the mobile sphere, but the same rules will apply here to that of niche sports events sponsoring:
(a) put your money where your mouth (desire to market to me & my friends) is;
(b) understand the rules of my game and how I will let you into my inner circle (see rules above);
(c) come to me with a product that truly will improve my lifestyle and let me know about that product with bespoke mobile creative output: this is my phone, not the public TV broadcast network…
… is that alright with you? It is that simple…
November 26th, 2007
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